Relying on University of Michigan data on consumers.in.ation expectations, we establish some stylized facts on the process of in.ation expectation formation across different demographic groups. Percentile time series models are employed to test for rationality and to study learning dynamics across the whole cross-sectional spectrum of responses. These display a significant degree of heterogeneity and asymmetry. Income, education, and gender seem to be rather important characteristics when forecasting inflation. In particular, high income, highly educated, and male agents produce lower mean squared errors. Moreover, socioeconomically "disadvantaged" respondents assume as a reference point their specific consumption basket, while more advantaged respondents actually observe the general price level. A common observation applying to all socioeconomic groups is that agents positioned around the center of the distribution behave roughly in line with the rational expectations hypothesis. Agents on the left hand side of the median (LHS) of the distribution update information very infrequently. As to agents on the right hand side of the median (RHS), we can affirm that their expectations are consistent with adaptive learning and staggered information updating. However, the speed of learning can vary significantly across percentiles and di¤erent demographic groups.

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:0824. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Howard Cobb)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.